The Lost Letters of Jack Kerouac
Youenn Gwernig and Jack Kerouac bonded not over Brittany as much as their shared experience of cultural alienation, living and writing between languages and multiple identities.
Jack Kerouac
Reading On the Road
It took four years for a glioblastoma, a brain cancer that has a median survival rate of fourteen months, to take my mom’s life. It took me those same four years to read Jack Kerouac’s famous work.
Writing in the In-Between
Writers squeeze writing in between their full-time work, even if they don’t talk about it. Journalist and TV anchor Jake Tapper did just that in writing his political thriller, which he wrote sometimes in intervals of only fifteen minutes at a time.
‘A Couple of Waterloos in Every State’
The US owns the road novel—for good reason. There’s Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath, and On the Road—to name just a few.
Literary Meals & Cocktails for the Summer
Maybe it’s because I’m always hungry, but meals have always been some of the most memorable scenes in books. I drink tea from a porcelain tea cup while reading Oscar Wilde, and crave fried okra or salt pork between readings of Faulkner and Harper Lee.
Writer & Artist: What We Can Learn from Writers Who are Both
In many ways, visual art gave birth to literature. The first stories written down were cave paintings. For years our alphabet was made up of pictographs which simply meant that the only people who could tell stories were those who could draw.
Ruefle, Hokusai, and the American View of Asia
Katsushika Hokusai, contemporary of Goya and Turner and Ingres, artistic godfather of Monet and Van Gogh, was recently the subject of an exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston. He’s been on my mind ever since. Most of us know Hokusai’s artwork from the image above, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa.” Posters…
Literary Boroughs #55: Mexico City, Mexico
The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. Posts are by no means exhaustive. The series originally ran on our blog from May 2012 until April 2013. Please enjoy the 55th post on…